The current (11 February 2011) issue of Science is a special issue on Dealing with Data. It includes a collection of free, online articles that “highlights both the challenges posed by the data deluge and the opportunities that can be realized if we can better organize and access the data.” Some of the articles are drawn from three sister publications: Science Signaling, Science Translational Medicine and Science Careers.

“Scientific innovation has been called on to spur economic recovery; science and technology are essential to improving public health and welfare and to inform sustainability; and the scientific community has been criticized for not being sufficiently accountable and transparent. Data collection, curation, and access are central to all of these issues.
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As you will discover, two themes appear repeatedly: Most scientific disciplines are finding the data deluge to be extremely challenging, and tremendous opportunities can be realized if we can better organize and access the data.”

One of the great things about the “data deluge” is that there is something in it for almost all computer science researchers including areas like machine learning, data mining, NLP, visualization, semantic web, security and privacy, social media, high performance computing, HCI, etc. Here are some of the articles that caught our eye: